Now, this totally caught my eye. Notice the PTR record shows that the name for that IP is hn.kd.ny.adsl – an uncommon TLD. So, I checked Wikipedia for a list of available TLDs and fair enough, the ADSL TLD does not seem to exist. If I were to try to ping hn.kd.ny.adsl, the address would not even resolve through the normal DNS system.
ping: unknown host hn.kd.ny.adsl

Now, this indicates to me that China is running its own root-servers, which does not surprise me one bit as it uses it to implement the Great Firewall of China. Since it does this, it is free to implement its own list of TLDs that nobody else uses in the rest of the world. This is all fine and dandy until ICANN decides to approve the use of an ADSL TLD in the future.

With the recent WikiLeaks fiasco, people are already talking about fragmenting the Internet. This is proof that the Internet is already fragmented – we just need to take it to the next level. Zero-One-Infinity, anyone?

2 thoughts on “Weird TLD in China”

This is nothing unusual and does not indicate anything about China using it’s own root servers.

What you must realize is that many ISPs use PTR records for a very different purpose than it was designed in the first place. There is no glue between the PTR and the actual A record (if there is any for that particular IP address).

This means that the server that holds the rights to provide authorized information about that request is ns.halyptt.net.cn.

2- Ask that server about the same IP address :

Name : hn.kd.ny.adsl
Address: 125.45.96.89

3- Try that same server with what it just gave as a PTR :

> hn.kd.ny.adsl
*** ns.halyptt.net.cn : Query refused

This means that this server is made to only accept PTR requests. Other ISPs do the same thing, sometimes with custom TLDs, sometime not. For example, tracing to aol.com returns one of the following hop from my location :

te0-1-0-1.ccr21.ymq02.atlas.cogentco.com

However, when trying to forward-request the IP of that PTR, cogentco’s own DNS system refuses the query.

Why do they remove the glue? I don’t know, but I also don’t know why they would provide it. For ISPs, the PTR records are a way to enable more verbose traceroutes. On the other hand, public A records would not provide any benefit. Most (if not all) ISPs have their own internal management infrastructure that is not only inaccessible from the Internet itself, but also relies on private DNS and IP networks.